Page 9

Nine

Crouched behind the parapet wall of a building rooftop, Atlas took one look through his monocular into the bed and breakfast’s corner café and knew things were about to go sideways.

He hadn’t wanted to believe what he’d read on that list Mary had handed him last night—an alias he knew all too well—but there was no denying the truth of what he saw with his own eyes.

No denying the calls, real and telepathic, that had gone unanswered overnight and this morning.

“What’s your cousin doing cozied up with the pretender?”

Atlas nearly dropped his spyglass. Cursing, he spun from the unsettling sight of Daphne and Dyami cuddled together at a table to the equally unsettling shifter who’d somehow snuck up on him, not a footfall or heartbeat warning of his approach, not a whiff of dog. “How did you?—”

“I’m good at my job.” His gaze drifted over Atlas’s shoulder. “Same as them.”

Atlas followed his line of sight to the sidewalk outside the café.

To the seemingly twenty-something redhead in a crocheted sweater and patchwork jeans and his silver fox partner in denim and leather approaching the cafe’s glass door.

Daphne and Dyami had probably noticed them already.

Icarus, with his tall, chiseled frame, blue eyes, and fiery hair was one of the most striking men Atlas had ever met; add in Adam’s rugged good looks and they were a formidable, distracting pair.

“They can’t be here,” Atlas seethed, his already sideways plan well on the way to upside down. He couldn’t even lob an orb to stop them from entering. Daphne would instantly recognize his magic.

“They can be,” Robin said, as he kneeled beside him. “Adam and Icarus are human. We’re not.”

“By that logic, my cousin and Dyami shouldn’t be here either.

” He might not have been a true eagle shifter, but Dyami was an elder of not-insignificant influence.

He had enough juice to make people think he was a shifter, by magical deception or otherwise.

And speaking of power... “My brother definitely shouldn’t be here, if he even shows. ”

“Except your cousin plays the convert, and Dyami the holy man.”

Icarus and Adam entered the café, and Atlas hung his head, no help for it now. “They’re going to blow the op.”

“They’re professionals,” Robin said. “They’ll watch for the hunter and neutralize him if they have to.”

“Shouldn’t that be your job?”

He swung his golden gaze to the side, eyeing him pointedly. “Someone has to keep eyes on you.” Then eyeing his attire, added, “In a suit again, I see.”

“In case I have to pretend to be Evan.” Daphne would immediately know it was him, but unless Dyami had paid close attention to his twin’s eye color last time or had been in the presence of Evan’s magic, he likely wouldn’t.

No telling if Daphne would tell him; no telling whose side she was on—Chaos or Nature.

Nature , fuck.

“What about?—”

“The pack has her covered,” Robin said, anticipating his query.

“At my safe house? That everyone knows about now?”

Robin shrugged and shifted his gaze across the street again. “Back to your cousin...”

“Maybe she’s playing him.”

“Or she’s playing you. Could she be working with Evan?”

The thought made his stomach churn. “Daphne and Canton were tight.” They were the oldest siblings in each family, born only a couple of days apart. They grew up together, worked together, each other’s professional partner. “I can’t believe she’d betray him or Nature.”

Robin was uncharacteristically quiet, as he kept a watchful eye on the café. “How much do you know about Canton’s final days?”

Atlas wobbled in his crouch, caught off guard by Robin’s question.

He braced himself on the parapet wall and let the familiar waves of guilt crash over him.

“He went off the grid,” Atlas said, recalling those horrible days of nothingness until one night he’d been jarred out of sleep by the sense of imbalance, of falling, like the earth had disappeared out from under his feet.

Three blinks to wakefulness later and he’d known his brother was gone.

Three weeks later, Daphne had returned with confirmation of his death.

He swallowed hard and shook off the ghosts of that awful time.

“But Mary became Nature, and Icarus a vampire, so Canton was successful.”

“And then he died.”

The simple statement had the definitive tone of consequence, not chronology, and Atlas was knocked off balance once more. “What are you?—”

Robin’s phone dinged, cutting off Atlas’s question. The coyote took one look at the screen and snarled “Fuck.”

“What’s going on?”

Robin tilted the phone his direction. One look and Atlas’s vision went red. In the photo Adam had snapped, Daphne was handing Dyami a sheet of paper with a sketch on it—of Mary. Her hair, her outfit, and her expression were the same as in the vision Daphne had nicked from him.

Was this why Canton had gone dark at the end?

Because his best friend, his family, his partner had turned on him?

How long had Daphne been working with the enemy?

Had some part of Atlas always known and that was why he’d stayed away from home?

Why he’d never worked as a team? He knew why when it came to the shifter beside him, why it was easier to hate him than open himself to fate’s mercy.

But when it came to Daphne, was this what had stopped him from taking Canton’s place at her side?

He didn’t hesitate, raising his hand to snap, and at the last second, Robin grabbed hold, porting them both through the tear—and into a fight already in progress. Daphne was hurling orbs, keeping Adam and Icarus trapped behind a flipped-over table, while she and Dyami scuttled for the door.

“Can you get her hands?” Atlas whispered low. “Like you did mine at the club?”

“If you can hold those orbs back long enough for me to get behind her.”

Atlas couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen Daphne’s magic, but he was certain it hadn’t been swirled green and gray like it was today.

There was no yellow in it, not like in Evan’s, but there was enough doubt in her mind and magic that Atlas’s full-strength conviction easily deflected her orbs.

Given the opening, Adam and Icarus chased a fleeing Dyami out the door, while he and Robin advanced on the real traitor in the room.

One more blinding blast by Atlas, and an impressive human leap by the shifter—from a bench seat, to a table, to an overhead beam, from which he swung to a landing behind Daphne—and they had her.

Robin shoved his fingers through her smaller ones, holding them apart, while Atlas pushed her back against Robin’s sturdy frame, a hand circling her throat.

“When did he get to you?” he demanded.

She didn’t have to ask who. Yellow flickered in her eyes, streaking through the green, before her once vivid irises faded to dull gray. “When I lost another cousin.” She gulped, her words pleading and strained as she forced them out beneath his hand. “We can’t keep going like this, Atlas.”

His heart ached with sympathy and betrayal.

He understood, better than anyone—the exhaustion and loneliness, the ups and too many downs, the never-ending fight.

And she’d been fighting it longer than him.

Long enough, it seemed, to consider a different path.

One that led away from him, from the promises they’d made to their mothers, and from the calling they’d all once served.

She’d been a beacon to him, strength and hope in a world that too often seemed hopeless. “I trusted you. I looked up to you.”

“Join us.” Yellow swirled in the gray. “Let’s end this.”

End this.

He didn’t have a choice. “You know what she looks like.”

If Daphne was telling the truth, she’d only just switched sides, but that sense of falling like he’d felt the day Canton had died ripped through Atlas again.

Together with another tear in his chest like the day he’d lost his other brother.

They’d both known, Canton and Cole. Both going it alone rather than risk the breaking point they knew Daphne had somewhere.

Yet only he was left to find it.

To end this.

“You told me, cuz,” she said. “Deep down, you want this to be over too.”

A final manipulation, and yet, nothing compared to Atlas’s over the past decade, moving pieces around the board to fit his agenda, but today he wasn’t the one in the wrong.

“No.” Wetness pricked the corners of his eyes, as he pressed more firmly with his hand. “You stole it from me.”

“You don’t have to keep going like this,” she urged him once more.

If only that were true, if only his destiny hadn’t been set the day he and Evan were born and cemented for good when the man behind Daphne and his twin sister had come into this world.

“I do,” Atlas said, voice wavering, his vision wobbly with unshed tears.

“It’s the name she gave me.” He lifted his other hand and cupped her cheek, wiping away the tear that streaked down her own pale cheek, a match to the one racing down his. “I love you,” he told her.

“I love you too.” She closed her eyes, her final words a whisper. “And I forgive you.”

“Thank you,” he said, even if he didn’t believe there was enough forgiveness in the world to save him. From any of this. He closed his fist around her throat and added another loved one lost to the war.